Consensus-Based Formation Control of Multiple Nonholonomic Vehicles Under Input Constraints

We address the open problem of consensus-based formation control of nonholonomic multiagent vehicles with pre-imposed input constraints. That is, the problem of stabilizing a group of second-order differential-drive nonholonomic robots, making them acquire a determined formation pattern around a non pre-specified point on the plane and a common non pre-specified orientation. This problem is also known as leaderless full consensus. Our controller is smooth, time-varying, and fully distributed. Its design is a natural modification of another controller proposed earlier, which relies on proportional feedback, damping injection, and a smooth time-varying term that injects persistency of excitation in the system to overcome the effects of nonholonomicity. It is assumed that the robots communicate over a network with an undirected-graph topology.